Losing Touch

Sometimes there are things that keep us distracted from what we’re intentionally trying to either finish or progress on. What I find myself doing sometimes is getting tangible with my tasks. Doing one thing on my sites sometimes I run into a problem where I stumble upon three or five other things that I find I want to do to my site. Although getting tangible on your mission is fine, keep in mind the original motivation should never be overshadowed.

When setting up multiple campaigns, make sure, even when distracted, that your site or landing page doesn’t lose its integrity. I’ve seen many people get so distracted from their original tasks that they lose focus and end up running a shotty campaign.

Just make sure you stay focused on your main objective. Take notes of any sites you stumbled on and go back to them later. Finish the one project/campaign and then move on to the next. You’ll not only be more productive, but your days will go by so much quicker having ‘more’ to do.

What do we already know about affiliate marketing?

There’s plenty of information on the super highway on how to make money online, how to make money BLOGGING, and how to make money while sitting on your ass and hitting the refresh button.

The truth of the matter is there’s no easy way to get a turn-key product and make money on the web. There’s hard work, patience, concentration, attention to detail, and most of all, patience (as previously stated.)

Firstly, if you think you just bought a domain name and applied to a couple affiliate programs and got approved doesn’t mean you’re going to start making money right away. There are so many more steps involved before you start making your first dollar as an affiliate.

The first thing I suggest to do is make sure this is something you’re willing to commit to. This isn’t just something that you can work on for 20 minutes and come back to later; it’ll take you YEARS to make money rather than months. With that said, make sure what you’re going to promote is something you have a good amount of knowledge about. Look at your hobbies, something you might have excelled in school, or even something you’re simply surrounded by on a daily basis. The primary and most useful tool for making money on the internet is your personal knowledge about a specific product or niche; trust me, you’re going to need every ounce for your content.

My second suggestion as a beginning affiliate is to LEARN CODE. The more HTML, PHP, XML etc. code you know will only help make the entire process easier. Once you’ve crammed as much <?gibberish?> as possible, take it to the streets. Practice layouts, links, iframes, pops (enter and exit), tags. Tags are going to be something you’ll want to focus on very closely.

Now with those two initial steps into how to make money online, figure the rest out. If you have any roadblocks, feel free to visit any helpful resources you’re available to, including MYSELF.

…. Is Dead

How many times have we heard these dire words said in connection to some aspect of the internet?  When the first dot-com bubble burst back in 2001, people actually said “the internet is dead.”  Since then, we have heard that email, banners, paid content, and a host of other industry practices were dead.  But, do things really die in this industry, or do they change and evolve in new ways that we can’t always predict?  We can certainly debate this idea about many activities that have been declared DOA.  However, we can safely say that one marketing initiative once declared dead by many in the industry is very much alive.  A few years ago email marketing was certainly seen as being on its last legs.  Many marketers were so discouraged by their results that they decided to abandon the medium entirely.

As we all know today, email marketing is thriving, with marketers finding tremendous success with this medium.  Where many people saw only insurmountable challenges, others saw opportunity and found ways to get their emails delivered, opened, and responded to.

It wasn’t long ago that the search marketing industry was turned on its ear by algorithm changes made by various search engines.  Sites that came up on the first page in search results one day seemed to disappear the next.  Similarly to email, there were those who decided that the new environment was to difficult to navigate so they moved on to other marketing methods, rather than try to learn how to work within the new search landscape.  While others took the changes as a wake-up call to get their web pages more organized, cleaner, and more content oriented, realizing that they are providing information to the internet and not just buying traffic for their campaigns.  A few months after the new algorithms went into effect I, noticed search campaigns being geared more towards the pre-sale of an offer and web pages being more informative on the products they marketed.

Lately, I have been hearing that one field entries, including zip and email submit offers may be the next practice that is declared dead.  These types of campaigns have been around for some time, going through their own cycles of being saturated at some points, and fresh at others.  They have performed well for both search and email marketers, but have generated the most response in the incentive industry.  Today, we may be seeing some saturation with these campaigns, but that’s not to say that they are dead.

As with some of the other marketing practices that have been declared dead, innovation is the key to keeping these kinds of offers effective.  In looking at the number of affiliates who are marketing these offers effectively, I notice that many of them are not using incentivized sites or email.  Instead, they are thinking outside the traditional box and finding new ways to market these offers successfully.

The next time you hear that some marketing tactic is dead or dying, look at it as a potential opportunity.  When many marketers start walking away from a medium, those who persevere and find ways to overcome the challenges may just find even more success in the new environment

“Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.” King Whitney Jr.

David vs. Goliath

There has been much discussion about how to stretch and maintain a good ROI while utilizing some of the smaller players in the search engine field. Not too long ago, search engines were thought to be very promising and people were seeking significant additional sources of revenue. With all of the intense high bidding wars on the main search engines including Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the lovely group at Marketing Experiments has taken a look at the smaller search engines to see if they are able to stack up to the ‘Big Boys’.
The results were a little surprising. Against seven search engines with four campaigns they found there was very little traffic compared to the monsters like Google. The conversion rate of the best performing engine was more than 50% higher than that of the second best, and almost four times than that of the third best. However, the conversion rate for the best search engine was a shocking 3.16%. That’s right, of the whopping 410 clicks generated on that search engine, there were only 13 leads generated. Overall Marketing Experiments spent $584.76 for ads placed on that specific search engine with earnings of $292.38 in a CPA (cost-per-action) model.
These results are disappointing to say the least, and show that the CPA earned from one of the smaller engines was 43.4% lower than that for Google over the same time period. They were also 59.2% lower than Overture (Yahoo!). Traffic may have a big play in these results as well, but this just goes to show you that there are precautions to be taken while getting your campaigns off the ground. If you are contemplating using a smaller search engine, some of the precautions to look for include:
• Approach smaller PPC engines with caution.
• Test everything on a few different search engines to determine which will be the most profitable for you.
• If an ad you are running on a specific search engine comes close to profitability, test different ads and see if you can increase your click-through rate.
• If you do isolate one or more search engines that can deliver a positive ROI, make sure those engines have sufficient reach. If you are achieving only a handful of sales each month, the profits earned may not make up for the cost of setting up, testing and managing that specific campaign.